NBC’s Hannibal had its third season debut last Thursday and posted a series low of a 0.7 rating in the 18-49 demographic based on the overnights with 2.6 million total viewers. That would seem like a death knell for the perennially low-rated show, but the fact is that it had strong competition from the NBA Finals and it’s only two ticks down from its Season 2 average. Plus, its airing in the Summer whereas last year it ran during the Spring. Its numbers will probably trend down a bit more over the coming weeks, because that’s the typical pattern, but then it may not lose too much because it has a dedicated core following and could even improve if the basketball game drew away a lot of viewers. But honestly, I believe this is one of those rare cases on the broadcast networks where the ratings are not as important to a show’s survival. Hannibal has international financing backing it that may make it profitable to the network before it has even aired (similar to the deal CBS has for Summer entries Under the Dome and Extant). And since Hannibal continues to receive rave reviews, NBC gets to bask in the critical praise while possibly banking a nice profit from the show. What this means is that it’s hard to gauge the threat level to the show because I don’t know at what point the ratings are low enough that the network would rather just run repeats (or plug in another reality show) as opposed to keeping Hannibal on the air (and I’m guessing there are other suitors willing to step in in case NBC decided to cut ties with the show). As with last season, I’m passing on predicting the fate of this show (as well as this week’s returning Beauty and the Beast), because there are too many intangibles that I can’t factor in to get a good assessment of where the show stands. But my gut feel is that it should be on target for a fourth season renewal.

Last week, FOX’s new animated series Golan the Insatiable bowed to pretty tepid numbers (a 0.6 rating in the 18-49 demo with 1.6 million total viewers), and this past Sunday it slipped even further. The show could only muster a 0.4 score with 1.2 million total viewers which seems to suggest that its days are surely numbered. That rating was only half of the repeat of The Simpsons at 8:30 and a drop of over 40% from the Family Guyrepeat that acted as its lead-in. Which begs the question: why would FOX keep this show on the air if repeats are drawing higher ratings? I don’t know if the network has just done a poor job of promoting the show and people don’t realize that a new series is airing amidst all the animated repeats on Sunday night, but this one needs to turn its numbers around fast. At the current levels, FOX may decide that it makes more sense to yank Golan from Sundays in place of another Simpsons repeat and air out the remaining episodes on FXX as a part of Animation Domination HD. It certainly seems like a possibility if the ratings don’t improve.

A good debut for this show and its Live+3 rating improved it to a 2.3 score. More on this one at this link.

Chart Activity: As expected, this show debuted in the Top 10 (in the Number 10 slot) based on the ratings in the 18-49 demo and also made it to Number 24 based on total viewers. It will almost certainly drop out of the Top 25 based on ratings next week, though, considering its big drop for its second episode (more on that at this link).

For its debut, this show lost a fair amount of its lead-in from ABC Family’s hit series Pretty Little Liars. But it is right around the numbers that Chasing Life had in the same timeslot last year, so maybe this is good enough. Show Buzz Daily did note that Stitchers slipped notably from Liars in the 12-34 demo which is what ABC Family targets, so not sure how much that will factor in. If it drops much in the coming weeks, that could put it in trouble.

It dropped a bit from the prior week, but still looks okay at this point. If it has much more slippage, though, it could be in trouble.

Chart Activity: This show dropped out of the Top 25 based on the ratings in the 18-49 demo because there was more competition during the week, especially from the NBC playoffs. If it holds steady next week, it might return to the lower rungs of that chart.

More controversy over this past Sunday’s episode, but that’s not hurting the show’s ratings as it improved yet again and beat all non-sports programming on television for the night.

Chart Activity: This on slipped one notch in the Nielsen Twitter Ratings for the week to Number 3. In the cable charts based on total viewers, it returned to the Number 1 slot, up from Number 3 last week.